What “Vocal Fry” tells us about media science reporting

About a week ago, I first noticed stories about “Vocal Fry” appearing in the media. They all had much the same template: Vocal Fry, a new way of speaking that was described so poorly that I couldn’t actually understand what it was supposed to denote, is becoming trendy among college-age women because they’re emulating pop stars, no-one else speaks like this and those who do risk damaging their vocal chords. It all sounded pretty fishy to me, but today I followed another link about it in the hope of at least understanding what the speech style being discussed was.

What I learned from that article, and the Language Log post it linked to, was that about the only thing the previous reports got right was that there is a thing called Vocal Fry which some people use occasionally when speaking. There’s no evidence that it’s a new phenomenon (in fact there’s plenty that it’s not), or that it’s specific to women or a particular age group (c.f. Ira Glass using it extensively), or that it does any damage whatsoever. In fact, it’s usually a relatively subtle voice modulation which I think I unthinkingly use fairly frequently and have done since well before any of the singers blamed for starting this trend had any records out.

There’s really no discernable reason why we should be interested in this phenomenon, unless “we” is a fairly narrow group of experts on spoken language. But what is interesting, when a story as pointless as this gets any traction, is the meta game of trying to figure out why it was picked up at all. In this instance, I think the clue is the group supposedly uniquely party to the “new” “trend” – college-age women. The formulation of the story hits an incredible number of media tropes and targets at once:

When I watched the video it seemed perfectly calibrated to make young women self-conscious about their speech; particularly the part where people are identifying relatively subtle vocal fry in recorded speech. So we have our first media trope: playing on the insecurities of a group of people to attract their attention and make them feel they must know more about a non-issue.

Why women? Well the media loves to portray women as a homogeneous mass, led like sheep by the latest fad, who will hurt themselves terribly if we don’t ride to the rescue.

Why this particular age group? Well, they’re old enough to be independent, but young enough to not be respected by anyone older. And they’re generally not understood by people more than a few years older than them, so it’s easy to write outrageous nonsense without most of the audience noticing.

The invention of potential harm from something irrelevant, so we can scare people with that.

The “fake trend” story. I’m more used to these taking the form of “we noticed two people doing this, so now it’s a trend”, but this seems like the direct complement: “Everyone does this, but if we pretend that it wasn’t so before we noticed it, we can call it a trend.”

And finally, blaming popular culture. Clearly no-one in this has any agency, and it’s all Britney & Ke$ha’s fault.

This whole story was such a trainwreck of bad media reporting about linguistics. I know a few people at UW who have been studying sociolinguistic change in Northwest women, and none of them made these awful jumps to conclusions.

Interestingly in the UK we have noticed features of vocal fry in english female students (mostly 18-25 year olds) when we have been analysing their speech using electroglottalgraph techinques. They are not at all aware they have adopted this voice quality but we are inclined to believe the origins of this phenomenon is rooted in the huge influx of american television programs which have been aired in this country for the past 15-20 years. Our lecturer has told us that he has become increasingly aware of the increase in vocal fry in female students for the past 10 years. Fascinating. Apparently in the 1940s vocal fry was common amongst male BBC radio hosts.
Hopefully that nugget of information will be interesting to someone and sorry if it bored others to death.

Thanks for the comment! I am interested, at least, and given the age of the blog post you’re commenting on I may be the only person who sees it….

The mention of 1940s radio style really piques my attention, because when I listen to recordings of old broadcasts, drama and [especially] big speeches, I’m immediately struck by how different the vocal style was. Much more formal, and rather more bombastic, without my having had the technical knowledge to point to exactly what caused that impression.